الفهرس 
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Abstract
This thesis discusses both the performance and the formation of the Chicana identity in Joséfina López’s Simply María (1991), Confessions of Women from East L.A. (1996) and Real Women Have Curves (1997). It is divided into an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter one summarizes the theoretical framework employed in the thesis. It discusses Manfred Pfister’s theory of dramatic characterization, as well as Butler’s theory of performativity. It surveys the various definitions, styles, techniques, and strategies employed both in performance and identity formation theories. Each of the three successive chapters discusses one of the plays and blends the thematic and technical approaches by using performance studies to highlight the distinct identities of Chicanas in the USA.
Josefina López is one of the most popular Chicana playwrights currently working in the United States. She was born in Mexico in 1969, and moved with her family to the United States when she was five. At 18, she became a semi-finalist in the New York Young Playwrights competition, and a winner of the California Young Playwrights contest. López’ plays discuss her experiences as an immigrant from Mexico who followed her dream to become a writer. Simply María (1991) was staged in San Diego, garnering such positive response that it was produced on KPBS-TV. Real Women Have Curves (1997) was turned into a film for which López was the co-screenwriter. It won the “Audience Award” and a “Special Jury Award for Acting” at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.
López features Chicano/as in her plays. She focuses on Chicanas, namely, Chicanas who are raised in the United States, and have a minority status in their own land. Chicanas often face oppression based on ethnicity, class, gender, race and immigration. Therefore, to restore their identity, Chicanas have called for the Chicana movement, or Chicana feminism, in an attempt to establish a social, cultural and political identity for themselves. Theater was their medium to transfer their message and to achieve the goals of the Chicana movement. Consequently, through performance, López was able to face the audience who symbolize her community with their false judgments concerning the Chicanas’ oppressions.
Chapter One: Performance and Identity Formation
Chapter one highlights the role of performance in demonstrating the Chicanas’ lives, the oppressions they undergo and their suffering as well. Consequently, it visualizes the factors that affect Chicanas; i.e. the Chicano/a movement, the triple oppressions they undergo, and finally how identity is reformed and (per)formed under such circumstance.
Performance is the manner of exposing ideas and cultures of certain communities. Consequently, it is very much related to the identity of this group. Schechner argues that the “phenomena called either⁄all ‘drama,’ ‘theater,’ ‘performance’ occur among all the world’s peoples . . . Evidence indicates that dancing, singing, wearing masks and/or costumes impersonating other humans, animals, or supernaturals, acting out stories . . . are coexistent with the human condition” (66). It is also manifested that ”performance art, with its focus on identity formation, enhances the cultural and political specificity of categories such as ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality” (Arrizon73). Thus, through performance, identity is exposed and transferred to others.
It is doubtful that the notion of performativity would have found a place in the absence of practice theory. Therefore, the theory is characterized by a concern with Manfred Pfister’s techniques of dramatic characterization used to analyze a play, how techniques of characterization affect the identity theory, and how props, gestures, masks, costumes and all related drama elements are useful in displaying the main theory and helping those minorities in exposing their culture. Sociological studies have also proven that performance can express identity theories. Owing to these views, it can be argued that through performance, identity could be formed.
Identity is defined as ”a constitution based on the recognition of familiar and shared derivations including, but not limited to, ethnic, linguistic, religious, historical, cultural and political attributes with other people” (KOC). Thus, to form an identity, Chicanas had to be aware of, but not restricted to, their race, ethnicity and gender, and to avoid forgetting their origins while trying to integrate into the new environment. Identity also ”refers to both group self-awareness of common unique characteristics and individual self-awareness of inclusion in such a group. Self-awareness may be formulated in comprehensive cultural terms (ethnic identity), in biogenetic terms (racial identity), in terms of sexual orientation, and in terms of gender” (“Personal Identity”). Therefore, this interpersonal identity has to develop itself, passing by certain experiences until it becomes a collective identity, one that relinquishes all its interests for the sake of the group. Thus, to form an identity, it has to fulfill three main conditions: first, to embrace – and not to refrain from – one’s origin and race; second, to be a collective identity; and third, to be performed all over the world. If the identity contains these three elements, it is thus formed.
In accordance with this comes the Chicana identity, as its formation requires the three previously mentioned factors. Chicanas try to have a collective voice to defend their position and solidify their identity. They tend to keep their ethnicity/race in a frame, while trying to prove their identity through their collective voice; an attempt that brought about the Chicana Movement. The aim of the movement was the Chicana feminists’ “search for ‘a room of their own’ by assessing their participation within the Chicano movement. It existed because Chicanas were facing gender oppression in restricting their identities to being passive, weak, docile, unintelligent, and dependent whereas the Chicano man is often portrayed as an authoritarian, patriarchal figure who enjoys the highest status in the family.
Such themes find voice in the plays of Joséfina López because, as a Chicana, she has felt and experienced society’s underestimation of its Chicanas. López’s plays are based on themes like low self-esteem, class-consciousness, oppression, sexual bias, body consciousness and others. López is eager to search for an identity for herself and for other Chicanas who have found themselves between two fires: discrimination by the mainstream society and lack of respect and value by Chicanos: fathers, husbands and sons. López’s plays thus become tools to express a sense of identity for those women and to stress their beauty according to their own standards, not those of Anglo-America.
Chapter Two: Simply María or the American Dream (1991)
Joséfina López’s first play Simply María is more or lessan autobiography. It is her story, and the story of every Chicana. It is about the life of a girl who tries to mix between her roots, traditions of the Mexican world and the freedom of the American world. However, her father refuses her getting educated and having a life of her own as he prefers that Chicanas should stay at home – an action that creates a feeling of disappointment in María’s unconsciousness and leads her to a nightmare. She dreams of getting married and having nine babies and a life full of routine and inhumane service. After waking up, she realizes that she must be educated and improve, reform her identity by sticking to her roots while taking what fits her from the American world.
López employs symbolism to lighten the oppressive treatment Chicanas have. She uses the dream to let the audience see the reality of the Chicana’s life but in a dream; a dream that she can wake up from and change her life. She gives hope to the audience that if this patriarchal society gives any Chicana a chance to improve her identity, she will. Given this, she crystallizes these ideas on stage brilliantly using Manfred Pfister’s theory of dramatic characterization implicitly and explicitly. Moreover, she uses non-verbal technique of characterization in María’s dialogues with her father in which she uses such props like the typewriter, the pen, the letter and the envelope – the tools that elevate her to the intelligent elite.
In this play, López lets María fight the triple oppressions. She fights gender oppression in her marital dream. Realizing she cannot tolerate such treatment, she decides she cannot marry except after getting educated and having a prestigious work. Her dream thus becomes a dream of a new cultured Chicana with a new identity, and not just to get married, and serve at home. Similarly, she defies racial oppression and class oppression when she realizes that being a Chicana only will not allow her to have her target. She has to be a Chicana, i.e. a Mexican American woman who can hang on to her roots and try to benefit from America’s advantages. In this way, she will exalt her identity, and lift her class to the higher group she could reach.
Chapter Three: Confessions of Women from East L.A. (1996)
Confessions of Women from East L.A. is about nine Chicanas who represent the defects of the Chicanas in general. Each character symbolizes a certain oppression. They vary between the professor, the sexy teasing girl, theaddicted Soap opera woman, the artist, the revolutionary, the old lesbian Chicana, the old selling corn Chicana, a Chicana trying to pass to Japanese and a self-defense instructor. López introduces the icons of corruption, the victimized Chicanas. Then she offers the audience the powerful revolutionary Chicanas, to attract the audience to such a new perspective of the Chicana personal identity.
The play offers mythical interpretations of the characters in an implicit technique of characterization. López draws associations between the characters themselves and La Virgin de Guadalupe, La Llorona and La Malinche. She advocates the reformation of the interpretation of those personal identities. For instance, instead of viewing La Malinche as the betrayal figure and the evil character, she can be portrayed as the revolutionary Chicana who has the courage to change the old stable roles of submissive women, to turn them to new Chicanas who can call for their rights. In this sense, the new interpretation has served to create a collective voice for all the Chicanas to be known this way.
Performance helps López in this play too in asserting her views about the change she calls for. Her usage of the verbal and non-verbal techniques of characterization serves to elucidate her themes more. Yoko’s body language, facial expressions, props, for instance, were efficient in expressing her fear and low self-esteem as she keeps running and waving her fan in front of the Japanese manager to get the job. Moreover, all her costume and props are limited to Japanese outfit though she is a Chicana, which creates the feeling that she suffers from low self-esteem. Along with this come Bernstein’s costumes and props which include a super Chicana cap, a wonder woman outfit and a Mercedes car which make of her a stereotype of a powerful educated Chicana.
López in this play displays nine characters with nine different problems to assert the fact that the triple oppressions can take many faces. For instance, Roxie – the self-defense – instructor visualizes both racial and gender oppressions. She becomes a self-defense instructor after many times of sexual harassment without any authority’s interference, as she is an “illegal alien” who does not belong to the American society. Calletana – the old selling corn lady – is also a victim of the class and racial oppression. She was always arrested because she belongs to the low-class Mexican American category which has no right to live and earn a living. López’s play thus portrays the real problems Chicanas face in forming their identities and attempts to give them a voice through performing them on stage.
Chapter Four: Real Women Have Curves (1997)
Chapter four deals with Real Women Have Curves, a play that enjoyed great success and was both performed on stage and filmed. It speaks about a character named Anà who works in her sister’s factory with three women: her mother, Carmen, Rosali and Pancha. Having an order of a hundred dresses to be delivered in one week, they have to work hard to achieve this mission and deliver them in time. After many hardships, they were able to accomplish their target.
López portrays Anà – the heroine – as the example of the intellectual educated Chicana. However, she is fat and she cannot get married unless she loses weight according to her mother’s opinion. In this way, López presents the unjust and oppressive judgments people may have. Accordingly, she calls for fighting gender oppression, and for standing against such shallow macho minds, as women should be respected and loved for their minds and souls, and not for their bodies. In her play, López fights class oppression as well when she criticizes the expensive dresses that middle and lower classes cannot afford. She consequently calls for the rights of the lower classes to have a humane life. Meanwhile, she also proclaims the diminishing of racial oppression when she speaks about how those illegal Chicanas were living in fear in such a factory, hiding like rats from any one. She asks in her play that the government should adhere to proposition 187 and guarantee those Chicanas their lives to live securely. Eventually, her play reclaims that Chicanas’ rights should be restored, and that they should be regarded like all other American citizens.
López used Pfister’s explicit and implicit techniques of characterization in using props, lightening, costumes, sounds and facial expressions that highlight every terrible moment that passes by those four Chicanas while trying to finish the order. She sheds light on Anà’s notebook and pen, on Rosali’s diet bills and floral dress, on Carmen’s stretch marks, on Estela’s passionate looks to her tormento (lover) and her illegal residence card, on Pancha’s pocket which includes 1 dollar. These props have implicitly served to highlight how these women are really suffering – suffering from gender’s slim body dream, racial feelings of persecution and class feelings of poverty. Performance has helped López to assert such feelings, and to let the audience have pity towards those Chicanas and start looking at them differently.
To sum up, it can be said that López in all her plays portrays the real life of the oppressed and the persecuted Chicanas. She was able to grasp the meaning of feeling unsafe because she was one of those who suffer the triple oppressions. The performance of her plays makes them more real, more credited and believable. The techniques used have served to enlighten the audiences’ minds and hearts with the troubles Chicanas face. She offers a new way of thinking, and a change to the Chicana’s identity. In her plays, the Chicana identity was oppressed, depressed, reformed, (per)formed and united with other Chicanas’ new identities to form a collective call for change in everything; a change in education, in gender consciousness and in class consciousness.